Pertinent Links

http://www.weather.gov/

This is the website for the national weather service. It is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It provides lots of information from a basic weather forecast to the air quality index across the United States. It has an abundant amount of information available and is fairly easy to navigate to the information you are searching for.

http://graphical.weather.gov/sectors/conus.php?element=QPF

This link provides almost all the maps that you would need for predicting weather. It has three hour intervals for many of the maps so you can see how the weather is supposed to change as the day goes on. Another thing that I really like about this site is that it is very user friendly. It is not complicated to figure out what your looking at or how to switch between maps.

http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/basicwx/basicwx_ter.php

This link is very helpful and also user friendly. This map shows the location of the different pressure and frontal systems across the United States. It has great detail and labels the different isobars and is a very clear picture. There are also four different ways to view the map, which gives the viewer options as to what format they want to view the information. It also has six hour intervals which allows the viewer to see how the day will progress every 6 hours rather than a general forecast for the day.

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=44.74706&lon=-91.5015009&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical

Another link from NOAA is the hourly weather weather forecast. This particular link goes to Eau Claire, but it can be set to any area. I think this link is very helpful since it is very easy to understand and shows the weather on an hourly schedule. If you need to know when specific weather is supposed to move into an area, this is the link to look at.

http://weather.unisys.com/upper_air/skew/ua_sound.php?type=no&city=kmpx&region=mw&t=cur&expanddiv=hide_bar

This  is the upper air sounding plots and comes from Unisys weather. There are many different stations around the country, but this one is specific to Minneapolis since it is the closest station to Eau Claire. This chart shows how stable, or unstable the air is at that specific location. This information can be very helpful when predicting the chances of extreme weather. The right side of the graph also give you lots of data specific to that particular air mass.

http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sfc_map.php?inv=0&t=cur&region=mw&expanddiv=hide_bar

This site provides an abundant amount of information from dew point to wind speed and wind direction, just to name a few. It can show all the different regions of the United States, but this specific link deals with the Midwest. I really like this site because it allows you to see where fronts and pressure systems may be located based on the current weather conditions in different areas of that region.

http://www.goes.noaa.gov/goes-e.html#main-content

This link, also from NOAA, shows the amount of water vapor in the air. This specific link shows the eastern half of the United States, but there are different areas of the world that you can choose to look at. I like this site because it is very easy to understand and interpret. It gives you the ability to see how much fuel storms may have, and predict the severity of them.

http://www.accuweather.com/

I like this site to see what major weather stories are going on across the country. It gives you the option to search the current conditions for specific areas, but I find the news stories the most helpful on this site. Since it doesn't pertain to one specific region, you get a very broad overview of what weather is impacting different areas across the United States.

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=260.40,54.15,633

This site provides excellent information dealing with the mainly current wind conditions. It is very nice since you can overlay many different features on the map such as temperature, surface wind conditions and the jet stream. Another great feature to this site is the fact that it shows global winds. You are able to zoom into specific parts of the world, but it not limited to a certain place on the globe.

http://hint.fm/wind/

This site is very helpful at showing the current wind conditions across the United States. The map is labeled so it is easy to understand what colors correspond with which wind speeds. It does not show the jet stream wind, but gives a very detailed picture of the surface winds.